I am thinking about running a web server on my home linux box, and was wondering if xampp could be used to run one publicly for others to access from the web.
I see from the info supplied that xampp seems to be really for a development enviroment, but there is a security section to enable me to lock things down.

My first question being is xampp a good thing to run a public web server as long as the rest of the system is locked down. Xampp seems to be a lot less hassle than installing everything seperately.

secondly i have a domain I would like to transfer to myself and my webserver running xampp is this possible?? using xampp and any ideas how to do it??( i know not a xampp question really but pointing me in the right direction would be nice)

Possibly not much help but I do exactly that on a PC running PCLinuxOS. I've set the router to forward ports 22 & 80 (don't need 443) to the server PC, and FireStarter allows port 80 from everyone everywhere, port 25 from my local LAN, and port 22 from my local LAN & my office remote IP address only. So far so good - server logs show many SSH attacks, but system still up & running.

However, my setup hosts a non-critical low traffic application and there is nothing else on the hosting PC, and though I have several Windows PC's on the same LAN, they do not share the same network domain as the server (not sure how much security this provdes though). This may not reflect your situation however.